Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer, & Mongrel on Ubuntu 6.06

Ok after playing with Ubuntu, Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer, and Mongrel, I've decided that this is the deployment stack I want to use for at least the next month. snicker

Since I was using a few different sources as references while setting this up, I thought I'd post exactly what I did to get everything installed correctly to suit my needs. This won't go into how to actually DEPLOY your rails app into this environment, but it'll show you what you need to do to get it all installed and set up.

MySQL & Postfix

Lets install Postfix here really quick. We will configure it later but if we don't install it before we install MySQL, apt will pull in Exim as a dependency. We don't want this so lets pre-empt it by installing Postfix.
sudo apt-get install postfix

The Postfix installer will ask you a question about what type of server it is. I just chose "Internet Site".

Don't worry about those couple of errors. That just happens sometimes when building the RDoc documentation. If you look closely, you will see that it says "Successfully installed foobar..." a bunch of times.

Mongrel & Friends

It was previously advised to install Sendfile in this stack, but apparently it doesn't serve the static content like it was once suggested. So the speed boost isn't actually there. This means its just extra software to blow up. So don't install it.